A huge thank you to everyone who has visited the OS blog over the last 12 months and been keeping up to date on all things maps and data. We’ve totted up the figures to work out your favourite blogs from 2018…so take a look and catch up on any you missed first time around.

Great Britain’s largest islands

The stunning poster created by Joe Harrison in our GeoDataViz team, working with the University of Sheffield, showcases the 82 islands of Great Britain which are larger than 5km2. It also created wide debate about what was and wasn’t an island and even what is Great Britain!

As Christmas draws closer, nights lengthen and temperatures drop, many people will be doing their Christmas shopping, mince pie baking and Christmas card writing. This is also one of the busiest times of year for many businesses. Utility companies need to ensure people remain warm, online shopping delivery companies are frantically getting Christmas presents delivered on time, and the financial sector is processing and validating purchases.

This is all of course not forgetting Santa and his elves getting ready for the all-important night of December 24th. Most of the time as members of the public we can simply sit back and enjoy some festive treats why this all happens seamlessly without us even thinking about it.

We might venture out into the ever increasingly bracing weather for the traditional family walks possibly using one of our OS paper maps, something our brand is most known for. These maps are what made OS famous, but analytical data products are now how OS supports ever increasing numbers of businesses delivering these vital services to you over Christmas, and throughout the rest of the year.

During August 2018 the cities of Glasgow (UK) and Berlin (DE) jointly-hosted the inaugural edition of the European Championships, a new and exciting multi-sport event. The Glasgow 2018 European Championships brought together some of our continent’s leading athletes. The city of Glasgow and Scotland hosted aquatics, cycling, golf, gymnastics, rowing and triathlon with athletics and the marathon being hosted in Berlin. In total, there were 11 competition days, 12 sports venues and 188 medal events. More than 3,000 athletes travelled to Scotland while 1,500 athletes competed in Berlin.

Combining the power of ESRI’s ArcGIS Online platform technology with highly detailed geospatial data from OS, Glasgow City Council created web mapping applications for planning and operational purposes prior to and throughout the event.

The use of web mapping applications was vital in assisting with the planning, staffing and operational elements of the venues and cycling routes, particularly the events which involved public roads.

7 months ago we announced Southampton Children’s Hospital Charity as our corporate charity. We’ve been busy raising money and so far, our total is £8,943.03!

As well as our #charitytuesday events, cake sales and football sweepstakes (mentioned in our previous blog), we have had a few big events which have considerably contributed to our total that we’d like to shout about.

So far, we have looked at visualising Royal National Lifeboat Institute and Ordnance Survey data using QGIS and Kepler software. In this, our third technical blog, we will be using Tableau.

Tableau is a data visualisation software that is used for creating a wide range of different visualisation to interactively present data and obtain insights. It has a very intuitive user interface and you don’t need any coding knowledge to work with it. For this tutorial we will be using Tableau Public which can be downloaded here.

We will be creating a spider map or origin-destination map that shows paths between our origins (RNLI stations) and destinations (call-outs). All the data you will need for this tutorial can be found here.

Within this data folder there is a CSV file called tableau_finished which was created using a combination of the RNLI_Return_of_Service_20082006.csv and RNLI_Lifeboat_Station_Locations.csv. Read More

Did you know?

There are 238 lifeboat stations around the coasts of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man and Channel Islands.

Tower Lifeboat Station on the River Thames in London is the RNLI’s busiest.

There are 349 lifeboats in the RNLI fleet.

The RNLI have 4,966 volunteers.

It cost £176.5m to run the RNLI in 2017.

Last week we looked at using QGIS to create some visualisations using data from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and Ordnance Survey. This week we will be taking the same datasets and working with them within Kepler, Uber’s new open source geospatial analysis tool.

KEPLER (Pt 1)

Kepler is great for creating a range of different visualisations easily and quickly, and to begin with we are going to look at creating a visualisation depicting where in the UK most emergency call-outs are made. To do this we will need to download the RNLI Return of Service data.

Continuing our series to introduce you to the amazing individuals within OS and showcase the variety of work we do, meet Lisa Allen. While Lisa is relatively new to OS, she has already made her mark. Here, she gives us an insight into her role in the OS Data Office and how she gives our data a voice…

How long have you worked for OS?

I am a newcomer to OS as I started in April this year. Before I joined I worked across Government on projects such as the Defra Open Data challenge and preparation for the Data Protection Act 2018.

What is your role?

I am the Head of Data Management and Requirements. Being part of the new data office and working for OS’s first Chief Data Officer Caroline Bellamy was an exciting prospect I could not turn down!

In an emergency the importance of location is critical. Knowing the precise whereabouts of an incident can be the difference between life and death.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) are the charity that saves lives at sea. Responsible for saving over 140,000 lives since their formation in 1824 they work with a dedicated team of volunteers, staff and community fundraisers. They allow us to enjoy our shorelines and water, safe in the knowledge that in an emergency they will be there to assist us.

There is a lot of data behind the lifesaving and in 2017 RNLI teamed up with ESRI to create an open data portal to help share some of this data.

About Us

OS is Britain's mapping agency. We make the most up-to-date and accurate maps of the country. But we're also a digital business, and we use our content to help governments, companies and individuals to be more effective both here and around the world.